THE NEW EROTICISM

ISBN-10: 0-394-43806-X
Editor: Philip Nobile
Title: The New Eroticism
Subtitle: Theories, Vogues and Canons

Introduction: Philip Nobile
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Place of Publication: New York
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Year of Publication: 1970
Format: 145x218mm
Pages: xii+240
Jacket Design: Bob Cuevas
Binding: Cloth spine and boards in duotone dust jacket
Weight: 500gr.
Original Price: N/A
Entry No: 2011020
Entry Date: 25^th October 2011

BOOK DESCRIPTION

“There is no effective sexual calculus, no social science to measure sexual change,” Philip Nobile writes. “And the available evidence on the so-called sex revolution is purely circumstantial.” We are obviously in a period of experimentation in this area-some of it directed toward an attempt to redefine our habits and needs. Much of the writing in this volume describes various facets of the current scene, guesses at the future, and analyzes the implications of the new freedoms of choice. But implicit even there are the deeper questions that emerge out of the work of such men as Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse that ponder not only our history of sexual mores but what it means to be a sexual human being.

Professors Brown and Marcuse are represented by excerpts from Life Against Death and Eros and Civilization; they resurrect the body and abolish repression in a reinterpretation of Freud. The essays that follow, with their descriptions of the new styles and new standards in sexual behavior, demonstrate the connection between changing consciousness and society’s views and the actng out (or stamping out) of certain sexual impulses. E.J. Hobsbawn discusses the connection between modern political and sexual revolutions.

The next group is led off by Ernest Becker’s “Everyman as Pervert” and Thomas Nigel’s “Sexual Pervesrion,” two philosophic articles that recount and criticize the clichés about what constitutes sexual perversion. This is followed by  decriptions of some things that pass for perversion: voyeurism (by Dorothy Kalins); “The New Homosexuality,” by Tom Burke; “Naked Therapy,” by Paul Bindrim; body painting (by Joe Mancini).

Literature and pornography are treated by George Steiner and Kenneth Tynan. There are articles on the enormously successful Playboy and Screw, and Jeremy Bugler writes about sex in advertising in “The Sex Sell.”

The performing arts are victims of creeping sex. Robert Craft covers topless Hollywood girls and other phenomena, such as Oh!Calcutta!, and there are comments on Che, Sex Rock, and “Pop Sex” – the last, a sex mores fantasy by Craig Karpel.

Charles Winick takes a dismal view of the decline of libido in “The Desexualized Society,” and Dan Greenburg lampoons the sex-lab technique in “Was It Good for You, Too?,” a satire on the Johnson-Masters experiments.

Two interpretations clash on female orgasm: Susan Lydon’s “Liberating Woman’s Orgasm” and Leslie Farber’s “The Traditional O.”

Derek Wright in “Sex: Instinct or Appetite?” argues that there is a profound, necessary, and needed connection between sex and affection.

The New Eroticism is a serious and comic anthology of readings on the sex revolution –which asks the question whether our sexual government has been overthrown and a radical new consciousness achieved or whether we are merely writing new stage directions for the same old play.